


where the light enters

by rievu



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Lesbian Sex, Vaginal Fingering, a lil bit towards the end though, a testament to time and grief and love and other things in between, also a devotion to time and its passing, how love continues to persist, wounds and their healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 08:46:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19169797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rievu/pseuds/rievu
Summary: When others ask Cassandra how she managed to escape from the Fade, she does not know. She just doesn’t remember. All she remembers is a gentle kiss, tender in its touch, on her cheek and then a pressure on her hand forcing her forward. Solas later tells her that he dragged her out of the Fade, even when she was screaming after Lavellan.// if inquisitor lavellan chose to stay behind in the fade instead of choosing between hawke and stroud and how the choice resonates across time and dreams





	where the light enters

**Author's Note:**

> "the wound is where the light enters the body."  
> — rumi
> 
> "the wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. i recognize that i love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound i do not want to replace."  
> — jacques derrida (translated by alan bass)

Ellana of Clan Lavellan doesn’t know what drives her forward. In the midst of the arguing — which is absolutely daft — Lavellan glances over at the gaping Nightmare and thinks, _this is the end of the line._ She looks over at Cassandra and thinks, _one of us is getting out of here alive._

She grabs onto Hawke’s shoulder and jerks the taller woman towards her. In a low hiss, she tells Hawke, “Enough arguing. We do not have the time to waste.” There’s a brief flicker of fear in Hawke’s bitter-blue eyes when Lavellan says her words, and Lavellan realizes that Hawke thinks that this is Lavellan’s way of telling Hawke to sacrifice herself.

Lavellan’s lips pinch together. No, she refuses to demand any sacrifices today. She has had enough of needless death, of choices made in the hard and heavy shadow of war and battle, of people laying down their lives for her because they think she will save them all. The grand, ironic secret is that she has not saved them all. She has not saved every life. Some deaths still lie heavily on her conscience, and she cannot do anything more than to grieve and carry on, and she hates that most of all.

“Tell my brother that I love him,” she says shortly. “And tell him not to worry too much.” A wistful smile curls her lips and lifts them up to bare her teeth to the Fade-streaked air. “I always manage to find my way back home.”

She wheels around to face Cassandra, and she can already see the slow realization unfold on Cassandra’s pretty face. Lavellan breaks a promise she made to herself and leans up on her toes to press a soft kiss to Cassandra’s cheek, right above her scar. “I am sorry if this is too forward of me,” she whispers. “But I will not be seeing you for a little while. Take care, Cassandra. _Ir abelas, vhenan,_ for not telling you everything I wanted to tell you sooner.”

Solas steps forward and in a voice stronger than ironbark, he says in the old tongue, “You cannot. You have the Anchor.”

Lavellan gives him a lopsided smile and says with her own Dalish dialect, “You will know how to find me in dreams, my friend.”

“Determination, glowing deep and true, but misery just as bold,” Cole whispers. “The slow arrow, _felassan,_ the miserable solution, _hahren Islandil told me this story all the time by the fire,_ trembling, tenderness, _I will not lose another soul to this madness.”_

Lavellan looks over at Cole and sees the bitter understanding pass through them both. He understands; the others do not. He will not stop her. Bless the beautiful boy’s heart, she thinks. She silently thinks of everything that she wants to say to the people she leaves behind, and Cole nods once then twice to her. Lavellan gratefully nods back and now, knowing that her thoughts are preserved in some way, Lavellan warps through the strange array of space before her with a Fade step. The world melts and remakes itself around her, and she cuts through the swathes of fog and mist and Fade like halla butter. Her spirit blade materializes in her hands with a swiftness that rivals the wind, and Lavellan stretches her Anchor-marked hand up to the sky. The rift in the back grows brilliant green, but the Nightmare only has eyes for the flaming column of viridian light that consumes Lavellan whole.

Lavellan does not get to see her companions leave the rift. Instead, she sees too many spindly legs dangling off of the Nightmare and the wide, slavering jaws that almost snap over her with its broken-glass teeth. This is the one thing she wishes she could have seen, but she has to settle with a farewell gritted between her teeth.

 

* * *

 

When others ask Cassandra how she managed to escape from the Fade, she does not know. She just doesn’t remember. All she remembers is a gentle kiss, tender in its touch, on her cheek and then a pressure on her hand forcing her forward. Solas later tells her that he dragged her out of the Fade, even when she was screaming after Lavellan. Her throat is raw from too much grief, her body is aching from the bruises and scrapes, and her eyes sting both with too many and too little tears.

It feels like a constant, throbbing open wound. Lavellan’s absence, that is. She constantly combs through her memories over and over again to see if there was anything else she could have done to prevent that regrettable outcome. Perhaps if they moved through the Fade quicker, if she didn’t spend so much time looking at her own tombstone, they could have gotten to that rift faster and before the Nightmare arrived. It’s a hopeless task, but Cassandra can’t stop herself from nursing the same weeping wound over and over again. From what Cassandra can tell, the others feel the same way.

Mahanon takes the loss of his twin hard. They meet him near the base of the Frostback Mountains after they come back from Adamant. His feet are bare — no leg wrappings — and bloodied from the sharp rocks of the mountain. He has no halla, no horse, no dracolisk that carries him up and down the mountain, and sweat soaks his brow and worn blouse. That is when Cassandra realizes that he climbed down the mountain from Skyhold by himself and nothing else. He doesn’t even have any armor on nor any weapons aside from a small elvhen dagger hanging from his belt. It looks like he simply sprinted down immediately, heedless of the danger or burden.

“Where is my sister?” Mahanon manages to say. His voice is thick with grief, and his eyes are wild and dilated. There are old tears dried down on his cheeks along with a smear of dirt from some low-hanging tree or shrub that he must have brushed past. “Where is my sister?” he repeats in a voice that grows louder and louder in volume.

Cassandra’s hands shake as she quietly tells him, “I am sorry.”

“Sorry is an empty word that does not give me an answer nor does it give me my sister,” Mahanon snaps back, words and tone both like a whip-lash to the entire party. Cassandra and Solas both wince and turn to look at each other, but they have no words for this sorrow-fueled fury that reminds them so much of their lost Lavellan. The intensity of his eyes, the shade of his hair, and the planes of his face look eerily like his twin — as they always do, as they are meant to be — and looking at him leaves a stinging reminder in the nooks and crannies of Cassandra’s heart.

Cole nudges his way through and begins to sing a soft Dalish lullaby when he sees Mahanon. Mahanon freezes, and the only thing that Cassandra can truly see is the heaving of his chest. One breath in, one breath out, lungs and diaphragm contracting and relaxing over and over to make the cage of his ribs shake and tremble. Mahanon bends his head and folds his hands in a prayer that makes the tears flow down his cheeks. Then, he keens, high and loud. The sound pierces through the air and leaves a shiver skittering down Cassandra’s nape and spine.

Cassandra and Solas manage to drag Mahanon back up to Skyhold. The elf has hollow eyes that are deep and dark and nearly impenetrable. Cassandra thinks that by the end of the night, Mahanon’s learned how to bear the burden of loss when she sees him talking with the Bull’s Chargers and with Cole. He doesn’t look happier, but it’s not the earth-shaking sorrow that he had at the base of the Frostbacks. But the next day, he’s gone. Cole is also gone. Gone like ghosts after a midday sun. Cassandra curls her hands together and feels so useless, but there is no more that she can do for them.

Solas retreats into himself and spends most of his days in his study. The frescoes on the wall go unfinished. Cassandra once sees him trying to mix paint after a meeting with Leliana in the rookery. The elf doesn’t get far. After mixing the first glittering green shade for the fresco, he breaks down in silent tears that fall down his cheeks and pool in his paint palette. Cassandra never sees him try to paint again.

The Iron Bull takes it silently as well. A simple “oh” is all Cassandra hears from him, but she can see the muted grief threading through both the Iron Bull and his Chargers. Krem laughs uneasily when they first tell him about it, and his laughter slowly turns into one of horror and then to shuddering heaves of breath. Dalish bends her head and weeps before she settles down in the courtyard gardens and carves a staff of oakwood for Lavellan without saying a single word. She holds her own vigil, and she won’t eat or sleep until she finishes. The Bull and his Chargers stop staying in Skyhold as long as they used to and constantly move from mission to mission with little breaks in between.

“You can’t possibly be serious,” Dorian says incredulously when he sees Cassandra. “If this is a joke, this is an incredibly poor one. I’d rather have the joke where we nail my best cloak to the tavern stairs again instead of this one.” Cassandra finds that she can’t quite form words past the knot building on her own throat, and Dorian’s eyes widen when he sees it. “Oh, you’re entirely serious, aren’t you,” Dorian whispers. “That foolhardy elf with a heart too big for her tiny body. Who does she think she is, making sacrifices and gambling with her own life like that? Maker, Lavellan, wh-why couldn’t you just stay _safe?”_

Cassandra would like to ask the same question as well.

Josephine openly sobs and drops her tablet which cracks in half when it hits the stone floor. She kneels down and cradles the pieces in her hands, and hot wax spills and cools over the shattered wood. Her hands tighten and leave indents into the wax: perfect casts of her desperation and the whorls of her fingerprints.

Cullen wavers and Cassandra has to pry the lyrium box out of his hands and smack some sense into him with a book on his desk. She tells him in a voice that is sharp like shattered glass, “Is this what Lavellan wanted for you?” Cullen shakes his head and shivers, both from lyrium deprivation and from the grief that consumes them both.

Varric returns to his letters, but his handwriting shakes in the spaces of his grief. When Cassandra looks at the page, she can see where he stumbled and broke down. The way his letters drag and warp into shapes larger or smaller than themselves are perfectly tuned to the dwarf’s grief. But even in this kind of situation, Varric is silver-tongued, and he writes letters of condolences and reassurances with a kind of charm that almost makes Cassandra believe them too. He lets Cassandra read one that he writes to Merrill, and Cassandra can see how Varric is both so deeply grateful for Hawke’s survival and so deeply scarred by what that cost in the constant rhythm of his written words. Cassandra can’t find any more words to tell Varric or anyone else for that matter, so she brings Varric more quills, ink, and paper so that he can write it for them all.

Sera storms off in a fit of fury. Leliana’s scouts report that the Red Jennies’ activity significantly increases after Sera’s departure, and the nobility pays the price of Sera’s fury. Cassandra wonders if this is Sera’s way of coping — of saving other people when she could not save another — and finds that she can’t judge the crime and the robbery that she once viewed as petty. When Sera returns to Skyhold, she comes back with a new scar arcing over her shoulder and a new kind of weariness set in the lines of her face. She still laughs with a cackling crow, still tells jokes that would make Cassandra flush a bright scarlet, still tries but it’s not quite the same as it was before.

These are only some of the layers of grief that coats Skyhold over and over again. Everyone in the castle gleams with a patina of tears and numb shock. Cassandra overhears one mage say, “You know, when the Inquisitor survived Haven, I thought she was, well, invincible. I thought she couldn’t die. I guess this isn’t the same since she sacrificed herself, but I can’t believe she’s just... Gone. Gone like that.” Cassandra clenches her hands and realizes that she thought the same notion in the back of her mind. That Lavellan would always survive. After all, if Lavellan could survive Redcliffe and Haven and Halamshiral, surely she would be able to survive Adamant.

Cassandra clutches her side as if she was clutching the wound in her heart and on her mind, and she tries to tamp down the discordant and voracious grief that starts to fester in it.

 

* * *

 

It is several days after Cassandra’s return from Adamant, and she wakes up to hear tapping against her window. For a brief, blinding moment of hope, Cassandra wonders if it’s Lavellan, coming to say good morning to her in one of her eccentric ways, but then, she remembers what happened. Lavellan will never say good morning to her again: not through taps at the window or hugs by the tavern or messages scrawled with charcoal and tacked onto her door. Cassandra lumbers out of bed and wearily opens the window to find one of Leliana’s ravens with a note attached to its leg.

Cassandra carefully pulls the note off, and the raven fluffs its feathers up before cocking its head at Cassandra expectantly. “Yes, yes, I’m opening it,” Cassandra mumbles. She unfolds it and finds Leliana’s precise handwriting.

She is being summoned for a meeting. There is no ifs, ands, or buts about it, and Cassandra suspects that Leliana would be furious if she didn’t attend. Cassandra folds the note back up and searches for a pen to scrawl back, “Will be there.” She attaches it back onto the raven’s leg and offers it a few pieces of stale bread. “Sorry, I don’t have much else,” Cassandra says with a shrug.

The raven pecks at the bread thrice before it spreads its wings and takes flight. Cassandra watches it leave with wistful eyes before she turns back and faces her empty room.

The hall to the war room is nearly silent. Cassandra’s footsteps echo too much for her own liking. Normally, Skyhold is a constant flurry of activity and conversation, and the entire hold is a mix of too many vibrant cultures and traditions and employments all bound up by what used to be Lavellan’s leadership. Without that, Skyhold doesn’t seem to have the same spirit it used to, and the former vibrancy fades to a dull, muted silence wrought with grief.

When she arrives, Cullen, Leliana and Josephine are already there, ringing around the war table in a set of three. Leliana is the first to notice her with her quick, darting eyes, but Josephine is the first to speak as she folds her hands and says, “Oh, Cassandra! You’re here already.”

“The note said to come quickly,” Cassandra says as she shuts the great oaken doors to the war room. She pads over to the war table and runs the pads of her fingers over the worn, thousand-year-old wood absently before she notices the sword on the table. It’s the same sword Cassandra gave to Lavellan to mark her inauguration as the Inquisitor. Cassandra looks up with wide eyes.

Leliana unfolds her hands and carefully tugs off her gloves before she reaches for the hilt of the sword. Cullen and Josephine watch on, but Cullen watches with the worn stoicism of a soldier while Josephine watches with a kind of ephemeral, paradoxical constancy. But for Cassandra, she watches with deep alarm and says, “No, Leliana, you cannot make me do this, we cannot, she’s still, Lavellan is still—“

“Gone,” Leliana finishes. “It has been weeks of travel and then a week of mourning here in Skyhold, and still, Lavellan is gone.” Her gaze softens. “I am sorry, Cassandra, but we must fill the vacuum of power before the Inquisition’s network begins to crumble.”

“Leliana’s right,” Josephine says. A note of apology is heavy in her tone. “Already, I’ve had to reassure a number of nobles that we have a contingency plan set in place and that we’re only observing a brief mourning period before we choose a different Inquisitor.”

“And we don’t _have_ a contingency plan,” Cullen sighs. “We don’t have anyone with something like the Anchor to seal up the rifts. The least we can do is to do what we can, and one of the things we can do is pick a different Inquisitor.”

“Pick someone else,” Cassandra flatly says. “I can’t do something like this.”

“Then who else, Cassandra?” Leliana asks gently. Her hands are still on the sword as she says, “No one has invested as much time and effort into this Inquisition as you have. No one else has had the level of involvement that you’ve had. You were at Inquisitor Lavellan’s side for nearly all her major decisions, and you guided us during the chaotic days after the Conclave. Tell me, Cassandra, who else would you nominate?”

Cassandra falters. Varric is silver-tongued, but the warp and weft of words is only one-third of what the Inquisition requires. Solas is mired in his dreams and his regret, and no matter what the elf says, Cassandra still can’t shake the notion that there is something greater to the clockwork of his actions and the scale of his choices and reactions. Everyone else joined later.

Leliana, as usual, is correct, and Cassandra hates her for it.

“Then, without further ado,” Leliana says roughly. “By the powers vested in me as the Left Hand of the Divine and as the Spymaster and the Seneschal of the Inquisition, I pronounce you the Inquisitor. May the Maker watch over you, and may Andraste guide your steps.”

Leliana taps the sword’s point lightly over Cassandra’s shoulders, and Cassandra raises her head to feel a burden settle heavily over her metaphorical shoulders.

 

* * *

 

Cassandra opens her eyes to see Haven. The snow settles softly over the ground as the sun begins to rise past the horizon and into the soaring skies. It is dawn, and it is Haven, and although both of these things don’t quite make sense in conjunction with one another, Cassandra moves along with it.

Haven bears no ash, no char, no smoke or licking flame, no shadow-slipping darkness that covered it over the last time she was here. Instead, the snow coats everything instead and transforms the landscape into a veneer of purity and sanctity. For a moment, Cassandra can imagine that the Temple of Sacred Ashes is still intact and Haven still exists as a town and not merely as a name on a map.

Cassandra follows the path to where Cullen trained his recruits and finds her favorite dummy to work on. She reaches out to brush her hand against the marks she once left in it, deep and grooved, but to her surprise, the training dummy feels smooth and unmarred to the touch. She glances around her, wondering if the others are not what they seem.

Her eyes latch on to something in the distance. Just where the crux of dawn and the remnants of light meet, there is enough light to see the only other figure in this otherwise barren town. A whip-thin slip of an elf, dressed in scout’s armor and with green crackling sea-bright from her palm. “Lavellan,” Cassandra whispers. Her breath catches in her throat mid-way through the name, and a hitch in her breathing makes her swallow down the name. When she regains breath, she calls out, “Lavellan!”

She starts running after the image of Lavellan, and strangely, when she gets closer, the light of the dawn starts to glow more intensely. The sunlight reflects off the whiteness of the snow and it nearly blinds her. With it, the vision of Lavellan starts to fade. “Lavellan, please wait!” Cassandra desperately cries. “No, come back! I miss you. I miss you so much.” She hesitates. “Is this real?” she asks.

The vision of Lavellan wavers in front of Cassandra’s eyes, but it steadies itself and cocks its head at Cassandra. Oh, it hurts. It feels like a sharp-toothed knife running its razored edge over her, and she whitely yearns to hold Lavellan, just to make sure that she’s real and here. Lavellan, for her part, twists her fingers together as she gazes at Cassandra with such tenderness in her eyes. “As real as you can make it,” she murmurs.

“You’re really her then. Lavellan,” Cassandra gasps. “Maker’s breath, Lavellan, where are you? Am I… Is this a dream? Why aren’t you coming closer?”

Lavellan winces at that and tells her, “You are too wounded, _vhenan._ I cannot come near you.”

“What do you mean?” Cassandra asks as she steps forward. The minute her foot crunches the snow beneath her, the specter of Lavellan shimmers just out of sight.

Lavellan appears a few steps away from where she was, and her face is drawn over and over again with apology. It stretches the lines of her lips down into a frown. “You are too wounded, my love,” she repeats. She tucks a strand of her hair behind her pointed ear and purses her lips together. The snow continues to fall around them, and the sun is frozen in its rise to the sky. Pink and lavender bleed around them, but the snow remains incessantly and stubbornly white. Lavellan exhales, and her breath clouds in front of her before it expands into a fog. “There is too much pain inside of you for me to easily approach. Like a whirlpool, I suppose, like the one the old sailor told us about when we visited the coast,” Lavellan says. “I wish it was different. Truly.”

Cassandra squints at Lavellan. She remembers the old sailor well. It was during one visit to the Storm Coast, and both of them were soaked through with rain. Dorian complained endlessly as he was wont to do, and Varric ribbed Dorian about his soaked hair. They ended up taking refuge in an old sailor’s hut by the sea, and the man stoked the fireplace to give them all more heat as he told them stories about his sailing days. One was about a whirlpool with a dragon at its center that snapped up any ship or sailor that dared to venture close. Only a certain kind of melody was enough to soothe the beast and enable the ship to ease by safely. Cassandra remembers saying that it was a ridiculous tale that couldn’t be true, but the old sailor merely laughed and said, “Some things that are outlandish are more likely to be true. We’ve all got our own whirlpools. The song just depends on who the person is.”

Cassandra’s surprised that Lavellan remembers this, even in this section of the Fade, but she supposes that Lavellan’s keen memory would not have been fazed by the Fade. If Lavellan could remember that someone in the Hinterlands needed twenty bunches of elfroot, three weeks after she was told, then Cassandra thinks that this part of Lavellan would be preserved at the very least.

She exhales and adds her own breath to the fog. “I don’t understand,” she says. “What does the whirlpool have to do with anything? Why can’t you come near me? Why am I too wounded for this?”

“You say you don’t understand, but you will,” Lavellan promises. “It is all up to you, _vhenan._ Until then.”

“Why can’t you just tell me?” Cassandra asks.

“Because you already know,” Lavellan says. She approaches just close enough — twelve steps in front of Cassandra — and places a finger to her lips. “I will see you then.”

Lavellan disappears in a flurry of snow, and Cassandra’s left behind, trapped inside of an eternal dawn. She wakes up though and finds tears on her cheeks and a flake of snow still perfectly frozen on the tip of her nose. It melts when she touches it, and she’s left with nothing from the dream.

 

* * *

 

Cassandra also wakes with distinct confusion, but she has little time to spend on being confused. She wakes up in the room that was once Lavellan’s. Something that Josephine insisted on. Something to further establish the fact that she was now Inquisitor and not Lavellan. It hurts to sleep in the place where Lavellan once slept, and sometimes, Cassandra thinks that she can still smell embrium and ambrette in the room. The last trace of Lavellan in this empty chamber, she supposes.

She’s thrust almost immediately into the thick of things. Now that they don’t have an Inquisitor with an Anchor, Cassandra’s forced to re-evaluate their situation and regroup their forces. Thankfully, Lavellan managed to seal up a number of rifts within the territories that they currently had forces in, but there were still places in Orlais that weren’t fully healed yet. Cassandra reroutes some of Cullen’s forces to protect the villagers in that area from the rift and to find them a different refuge.

Once the war meeting in the morning is over, Cassandra heads to the library to seek out Solas. As usual, he’s in his study, nose-deep in a book. The frescoes and scaffolding remain untouched, and his brushes and other tools still lie at the very top of the scaffolding. It’s uncharacteristic of him to leave them out there, but Cassandra doesn’t spend time asking. Instead, she asks, “What are we going to do about the rifts?”

Solas looks up wearily and says, “There’s nothing we can do without the Anchor. It was designed to act as a tool for manipulating the Veil, and now that it is gone, we have nothing else to control it with.”

“What if we gathered as many mages as we could?” Cassandra asks as a follow-up. “Like the Breach. Can we buy enough time?”

Solas sighs, “You can buy time, but it will be dangerous and it won’t be enough. Weaker mages may be overtaken by a demon. Even if you heal the area around the rift, the main wound will not be closed without the Anchor. Furthermore, more rifts may open up as Corypheus increases and consolidates his power, and we will not have any means of countering it.”

Cassandra flattens her hands down on Solas’s desk and tries to steady her breath. “Then what about dreams?” she decides to ask. “You are a dream-walker, aren’t you? Can you find Lavellan in your dreams?”

Solas’s expression shutters, and Cassandra wonders if she’s crossed some unspoken boundary. He steeples his hands together and shuts his eyes. Weariness crosses over his face and settles into the lines by his eyes, but slowly, oh so slowly, he opens his eyes and says, “I could. I could, but it would not be enough.”

“Have you tried? Have you seen her?” Cassandra presses. The image of Lavellan standing in the middle of that frozen dawn remains in her mind, and with that, she hopes that Solas will say yes.

But Solas heaves an aching sigh and tells her, “No, I have not tried, and I will not try until she comes herself. There are some things in dreams that are better left to heal, and the minute we approach them with too much chaos and grief in our thoughts, we may corrupt that tiny seed of what we are searching for in the Fade. Such is the nature of a fabricated world where spirits and concepts mingle easily together as one.”

Cassandra gapes at Solas, wide-eyed and terrified. _You are too wounded,_ she remembers. “I see,” she says faintly.

Solas looks up at Cassandra and searches her face before he finally says, “Be wary and watchful of what you see in dreams, Inquisitor.” Cassandra flinches when he uses that title, but he continues, “Wounds are better left to heal, especially in such a place like the Fade where the true essence of you lies.”

“A whirlpool,” Cassandra absently says. When Solas twitches his eyebrows, she shakes her head and says, “Never mind. I’ll keep trying to find a solution.”

Solas’s shoulders slump as he says, “For both our sakes and for the world’s sake, I hope you do, Inquisitor.”

 

* * *

 

Time passes, and soon, summer passes to autumn in a flurry of colors. Red bleeds into the leaves around Skyhold, and the breezes drop in temperature until they feel more like a cold draft rather than a honey-warm wind.

Cassandra’s workload hasn’t decreased a single bit in the span between the seasons. In fact, she finds that the work has increased exponentially. One moment, she’s at a noble’s castle, trying to convince him that the Inquisition is still functional without the Herald, and the next moment, she’s fending off a demon from the latest rift so that the people in the next town over have time to evacuate.

Mahanon and Cole are still nowhere to be found, and without Lavellan’s presence to bind them all together, the Inquisition starts to falter. Cassandra rarely sees Sera around Skyhold now, and Dorian’s former lustre isn’t quite there as it used to be. Vivienne starts spending more time in Orlais and helps build up the Inquisition’s reputation within the Orlesian court instead. Cassandra’s grateful for the help that the former members of the inner circle still share with Skyhold, but their absence still makes a difference in the way Skyhold now feels.

Cassandra struggles to keep up. Right now, she’s traveling across the Bannorn to reach Highever where they’re reporting an increased number of rifts. Teyrn Cousland specifically requested the Inquisitor’s presence to help calm his people and to deal with the problem. Cassandra doesn’t know if the teyrn got the entire message about her not having the Anchor, but Josephine insisted that Cassandra go. “The Couslands are second only to the king in Ferelden,” she lectured Cassandra. “Ignore him, and you ignore the rest of Ferelden. For the sake of our forces, just go, Inquisitor.”

So, Cassandra goes. The Bannorn is far more peaceful than what it first was, but when Cassandra glimpses a bit of sparking green in the distance, she’s suddenly reminded of Lavellan’s absence. It hurts, but now that a season has come and gone since her absence, it feels duller now. Cassandra still doesn’t want to accept that she’s gone.

Everywhere she goes, she sees the autumn whispering into the trees, changing their hues and their colors. The animals start to fatten with the onset of the colder seasons, and the bears turn their attention towards the fish in the streams rather than Cassandra herself. Cassandra all files this under what she would like to tell Lavellan if she were here. She can just picture Lavellan sprinting ahead to pick the embrium seed pods, newly grown after the riotous blooms of summer. She can also picture Lavellan scaling up a distant cliff to chip out the drakestone weaving over and over through the softer rock.

But she is not. She mentions it briefly to Solas and finds, with utter surprise, that it does not hurt as nearly as much as it did once before. Cassandra runs her tongue over her teeth as she considers this new development in the midst of autumn and finally settles on the fact that she is moving on.

She falls asleep in her tent, listening to the last of the summer cicadas sing out their almost-mournful chirps now. Varric is on first watch, and the Iron Bull has returned for a rare mission out with Cassandra. Solas, of course, is with them to analyze the rifts in Highever, but he’s already lost in the land of dreams before Cassandra.

She wakes up to see the noon sun blazing down around her, just as hot as the summer heat that swelled through the countryside. The streets are not the same as she saw before. Instead of snow and worn dirt paths that Haven had, these are cobblestones and gilt, velvet curtains and silk skirts. This is Halamshiral.

Cassandra paces down the courtyard path, and as she walks, she finds her clothes fading from her armor to the garish red of the Inquisition uniform. The thickness of the fabric feels choking underneath the zenith of the sun, but the noon is beautiful. It still looks like autumn here: leaves in the colors of blood and apple-skin, branches starting to shiver under the touch of the wind, fashion trending towards autumn colors instead of the brighter pinks of summer.

“Time passes quickly,” a voice comments. Cassandra turns to see Lavellan, closer than she’s ever been before. Now, she’s close enough to touch if Cassandra reaches her hand out, and she’s dressed in Dalish regalia. The same that she wore to the ball at Halamshiral. Embroidery along the edges, a high collar, a cloak brushing over her shoulders and pooling around her ankles. She looks lovelier than ever, and Cassandra’s heart aches to see the sight.

“You’re dead,” Cassandra says.

Lavellan shrugs. “In a way, yes. In another way, no. It is up to you to decide what to do with the wound,” she says simply. She gestures over to the rest of the gardens and asks, “Shall we?”

Cassandra trails after Lavellan as she strolls through the gardens. Golden halla statues dot the landscape, framed by the reds and yellows and oranges of the trees. Lavellan pauses by each clump of flowers and brushes her spectral fingers over the blooms. “Have I ever told you the story about Fen’Harel and the slow arrow?” Lavellan asks as she cradles a dahlia in her hands.

Cassandra shakes her head, and Lavellan laughs. “Very well, I shall tell it to you right now,” she says. “Once, a village asked the wolf god, Fen’Harel, to slay a great beast that plagued them. He came to the beast at dawn and realized that it would slay him. Instead of attacking it, he shot a great arrow up into the sky. When the villagers asked Fen’Harel how he would save them, he said to them, ‘When did I say I would save you?’”

“That’s horrible!” Cassandra gasps.

Lavellan smiles, and she continues in her lilting voice, “So, later that night, when the sun set, the monster came to the village and killed almost every single people. Just before the beast devoured the children, the arrow from the dawn fell down from the sky and pierced through the great beast’s mouth and instantly killed it. The children of the village grieved for their fallen clanmates, but they still thanked Fen’Harel because he had done what the villagers originally asked him to do.”

“What is the moral of this terrible story?” Cassandra says incredulously.

Lavellan shrugs, “It was a story that the _hahrens_ always told to keep us from invoking the god’s name, but I think there is more to it.” She leans against a halla statue in the garden and sighs, “It is a warning to understand the ramifications of what you ask for. There is always something to be paid for every thing that you wish. There is the miserable solution — the slow arrow — that has an equal cost to the great task ahead. I do not blame the Dread Wolf because I understood what I had to do to gain what I wanted.”

“So, you charged the Nightmare, knowing that you wouldn’t make it?” Cassandra snaps. “Do you know what we’ve been going through? We can’t close a single rift without you here. The Inquisition is falling apart. Cole is gone, your brother is nowhere to be found, Vivienne left Skyhold, and Sera and Bull are nearly about to do the same. Can you really look me in the eye and tell me that this is what you would have sacrificed yourself for?!”

“Yes,” Lavellan says simply. “Because you are alive. Because you are still here.”

“I would have paid both Hawke and Stroud’s lives if it meant keeping you alive,” Cassandra says. Her voice hitches, and she starts to cry as she looks at Lavellan, illuminated by the midday sun.

“Stroud had to lead the broken Wardens. Some may say that they are a dying order, but a single mistake does not mean we should doom them or eradicate them all,” Lavellan says tiredly. She plucks a chrysanthemum from its stalk and spins the blossom between her thumb and index finger. “And losing Hawke means losing Varric, her friends, an entire city, an entire nation. It is no easy thing to lose a Champion.”

“It is no easy thing to lose an Inquisitor!” Cassandra bursts out.

“I know,” Lavellan says with sadness rimming the edges of her eyes. She drops the chrysanthemum to the ground, and it blooms into a new plant: as if she never picked it at all. “But Cassandra, my love, you are the Inquisitor now. You are not lost yet,” she murmurs. “You simply have to find your way again. You have already begun to heal. The world will heal as well. Look at the sun, Cassandra. Look at the season. Time moves on. We heal. The slow arrow comes, and you live with the outcome of it.”

Cassandra looks up at the sky and squints against the brightness of the light. When she looks back at Lavellan, she’s already gone. Cassandra circles around the gardens of Halamshiral, searching for Lavellan among the autumn flowers. Cassandra looks among dahlias, pansies, even goldenrod and autumnal iberis blossoms. Lavellan is still nowhere to be found or seen. But in the patch of royal elfroot, Cassandra finds a single plucked chrysanthemum blossom among the leaves.

Cassandra wakes up in her tent, and when she wearily crawls out, she finds that it’s already morning. Night fades around the edges of the horizon, and the Iron Bull sits by the dying embers of the campfire. “Morning,” he rumbles when he sees Cassandra’s tired face.

“Why didn’t you wake me for a night watch?” Cassandra asks.

The Iron Bull idly stirs up the ashes with a stick and says, “Dunno. You just looked like you were having a good dream. Didn’t wanna wake you because I heard from Sister Nightingale that you haven’t been sleeping easy.”

“Leliana… You didn’t have to do that,” Cassandra says with a gust of spiraling breath. She thinks of Lavellan among the golden halla and the chrysanthemums. “But thank you,” she finishes. “I appreciate it.”

“No problem, Boss,” Bull says. He eyes her critically. “You alright with me calling you that? I know that’s what I called her.”

“You can say her name,” Cassandra says. “Lavellan, that is.” Her hand shakes as she says the name, but she steels herself and continues, “I’m learning how to get used to it.”

Bull nods sagely and tosses the stick aside. “I know how it feels,” he says. “You know, learning how to live again and all that. Picking up all the pieces that were yourself and then patching them back together as best as you can.”

“We live on,” Cassandra agrees. She gazes up at the sky and wonders if Lavellan is out there somewhere in a place where the autumn still shows itself as beautifully as it does here.

Later, when they arrive at Highever, Teyrn Fergus Cousland greets them with a wide grin. “Inquisitor Pentaghast!” he calls out when they reach the main gates. He hurries up to Cassandra and claps her hard on the back. “Excellent work! I can’t imagine what you did before you reached the castle, but I received a note today that the rifts are all closed. Inquisition banners were all planted nearby to show that they were safe.” He clasps her hands firmly and says, “I cannot thank you enough, Inquisitor. Highever will remember these boons you’ve done for us.”

Cassandra exchanges a look with Varric, Solas, and the Iron Bull, but Solas is the first to speak. “Excuse me, my lord,” he says. Teyrn Cousland turns to glance at Solas quizzically, and Solas continues, “I am the lead expert on rifts within the Inquisition. Just before we celebrate, I would like to take the Inquisitor with me to ensure that the rifts are permanently closed. We cannot be too safe, after all.”

Teyrn Cousland blinks, but he laughs, “Of course, of course. My, Inquisitor, you really are a wonder. Traveling this far from the Frostbacks and then fixing the trouble as soon as you arrive? Marvelous. Go right ahead, but send a scout just before you arrive so that I can prepare a celebration feast.”

Cassandra thanks him and quickly takes her leave, saddling her horse back up as soon as possible. They all gallop to the nearest site, and sure enough, the rift is completely gone. Solas checks the area over and over again with magic, and he confirms that a rift was there but now is not. No one can figure it out, but Cassandra steps over to investigate the Inquisition banner. It’s the standard banner — sigil and all — but at the base of the banner planted into the ground, there’s a single chrysanthemum blossom.

 

* * *

 

Autumn fades into winter. The red withers away to brown, and the gold of autumn afternoons turns into the silver of winter snows. Cassandra remains the Inquisitor, and the strange occurrence of closed rifts continues onward. Not that Cassandra is complaining, but it baffles everyone within her council and her inner circle. No matter how many times Solas investigates the areas of the closed rifts, he still can’t figure out what’s going on.

Cassandra, for her part, carries on. She holds more meetings with Empress Celene and King Alistair in hopes of resolving tension between the two nations. They manage to create a plan together that enables troops from all three forces to rebuild after the chaos of the rifts. Both nations promise to forward any intelligence gathered on the Venatori and Corypheus to Leliana as soon as possible, and Cassandra hopes that this is a promise that both will keep.

She reaches out to other countries as well. Nevarra, in particular, is eager to reconvene with her. Uncle Markus was never eager to claim her as part of his bloodline after the incident with her parents, but now, he sends Mortalitasi and other ambassadors to Skyhold’s gates. Josephine is always eager for a change to extend their influence and their networks, so Cassandra sits through the boring meetings and dinners with Josephine by her side. When Cassandra doesn’t talk enough, Josephine pinches her under the table and smiles.

It’s after one of these dinners that Cassandra dreams again. She falls asleep quickly in her — Lavellan’s — bed, faster than she’s ever done before. When she opens her eyes again, she’s in a field of waving grass, and in the distance, Cassandra can see the sails of aravels puffed full with wind. The sun is setting and with it, a thousand colors bleed into the canvas of the sky and paint it with a myriad of colors that seem brighter than anything Cassandra has ever seen before. In fact, Cassandra’s never seen this before

“Welcome to the Free Marches,” Lavellan’s voice says. Cassandra swivels around to see Lavellan standing right behind her. The closest that she’s ever been in a dream. Lavellan gives her an easy smile, but at this distance, Cassandra is close enough to see that Lavellan’s irises have gone completely green and the Anchor is now constantly alive in the center of her palm, like gaatlok and magefire and everything in between.

“Do you know this place?” Cassandra manages to ask. She looks at Lavellan, tries to take all of her in and embed her in her memory permanently. Twilight now starts to expand across the sky, but in the brief moment before it does, she sees the planes of Lavellan’s face coated over and over again with different shades of light. Cassandra commits them all to memory.

Lavellan looks at her with equal measure, and in that look of hers, Cassandra knows that this is the last time. “Yes,” she finally replies. “This used to be my home.”

“It still is your home,” Cassandra says.

Lavellan steps forward so that she is right beside Cassandra and loops her arm with Cassandra’s. Cassandra shivers against her cool touch and realizes that this is the first time in several seasons since she’s touched Lavellan. “Not really,” Lavellan answers. “Not anymore. Soon, this place will be nothing but fire and red lyrium. I think my brother already knows. I have tried to tell him. I have found my way home. I can do nothing more.”

“How do you know? Do you visit others in their dreams?” Cassandra asks.

Lavellan exhales out, and in that span of breath, the dim stars in the sky start to shake and splinter on their edges. “It is difficult,” she confesses. “I do not know if I am Lavellan or if I am Anchor or if I am Fade. But I try. I try to remember, and I must settle for that in the end.”

“I miss you,” Cassandra confesses. “I miss you so much that it hurts.”

Lavellan looks at her with eyes that seem far older than she is. “I know it does, _vhenan,"_ she replies softly. “Like a wound, no?”

Cassandra supposes that Lavellan knows best between the two of them as to how much it hurts. After all, she’s the one in the Fade while Cassandra is the one in reality. That doesn’t stop Lavellan from being completely right though. “Yes,” Cassandra says in a shaky exhale of breath. Lavellan reaches out to cup her cheeks, and Cassandra melts into Lavellan’s touch. She pulls Lavellan closer until she’s almost cradling her. Lavellan peppers kisses against Cassandra’s skin while she has the chance, and Cassandra skates her hands down Lavellan’s back with an unsure touch.

Lavellan reaches up to curl her hands around the lines of Cassandra’s face, and as if she were telling her a secret, she whispers carefully, “But _vhenan,_ the wound is where the light enters the body.”

“What do you mean?” Cassandra asks. Her hands still, but Lavellan removes her hands from Cassandra’s face and starts mapping a path down Cassandra’s body. “What do you mean?” Cassandra repeats.

Lavellan cryptically says, “It is a gift to be gutted. You already know why.” Then, she sucks a dark mark right in the dip between Cassandra’s neck and shoulder, and her fingers delve past Cassandra’s trousers and smallclothes until they crook just so. Now, it is Cassandra’s turn to arch against Lavellan, and they both laugh in small breaths. Lavellan arches against Cassandra and sighs heavily, “A shame we did not start this sooner.”

Cassandra fumbles with Lavellan’s clothes, and for a startling second, she realizes that she has never slept with a woman before. A shame, just like Lavellan said. A shame she did not start this sooner, but if this is to be the last time she ever sees Lavellan, she promises herself that she will make the most out of it.

Lavellan eases Cassandra down, slow and easy, on the soft grass of this dreamscape of the Free Marches. The world seems like it is both upside-down and topside-up as Cassandra leans her head back, and once again, the stars in the night sky glitter above them. Cassandra thinks that there are too many stars in the night sky than what she remembers there to be, but she forgets to think when Lavellan brushes her finger over Cassandra’s clit. Cassandra doesn’t know how, but Lavellan manages to divest Cassandra completely of her clothes in the moment of her distraction. “Clever,” Cassandra laughs. “Clever and quick.”

“Have I ever been anything but?” Lavellan says in return, and Cassandra laughs once more. However, the laughter spikes up to a gasp and then a half-sob as Lavellan devotes her attention to Cassandra: hands and lips and tongue and deftness all wrapped up into one. Time seems to slow down to a trickle around her, and the only thing that Cassandra feels is heat: honey-sweet and summer-warm.

“I love you,” Cassandra gasps out as she starts to ride on her climax, and momentarily, the stars grow larger and brighter until they hang too close to the luminous moons. Then, she comes on a glistening wave of pleasure and jerks her hips against Lavellan, grinding down on the pleasure as it comes and goes.

Her hands reach out blindly for Lavellan, and she starts the gentle process of mapping out Lavellan’s body and learning it for what it is. She tries to mimic what Lavellan did for her with her hands and her mouth. Lavellan moans softly and when Cassandra looks up at Lavellan, she looks radiant under the moons’ brightness. Wildflowers frame her limbs, dotting colors of the sunset nearby her skin. Cassandra resumes her work and feels Lavellan tense underneath her touch just before she arches up against Cassandra with a high keen.

When she comes down from the high, she reaches out for Cassandra. Despite the sweat drying on their skin, they curl into one another, tracing the outline of their bodies in the night. The sunset is long gone, and the only thing that gives them light are the twin moons and the infinite number of stars that hang low near the horizon and their bodies. “I love you,” Cassandra tells Lavellan again.

“I know,” Lavellan murmurs.

“I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone as much as I love you,” Cassandra confesses. “I didn’t even know that this was what love meant. Not until you weren’t there anymore.”

“I think that happens for many people,” Lavellan muses. “No one ever really knows what they have until they lose it, until they break it, until they wound themselves and live with the consequences.” Lavellan idly taps out an arrhythmic pattern against Cassandra’s belly and says, “Like I said, it is a gift to be gutted. It is where the light enters. Otherwise, the body will never know what light is. Only the shell of it.”

“I still don’t understand what you mean by that,” Cassandra sighs.

Lavellan smiles, and although Cassandra can’t quite see it, she can feel Lavellan’s lips curve against her skin. “You will, and if you do not, then there is a certain gift to puzzling out the solution to a secret over time,” Lavellan says. “But I believe you do. Otherwise, we would not be here like this, and we would be trapped in the morning instead of the twilight, _vhenan.”_

“Haven,” Cassandra manages to say. “Like Haven.”

“In a way, yes,” Lavellan says. “And once you healed enough, I was able to approach you closer.

“Halamshiral,” Cassandra recalls. “And the gardens in autumn.”

“Yes, the gardens,” Lavellan agrees, She runs her hand through Cassandra’s hair and sighs, “And here we are now. The fact that we are able to do this is testament enough to your healing.”

“This is the last time, isn’t it?” Cassandra dares to ask. Lavellan looks at her sadly, and Cassandra can count a thousand shades of green in her once-brown eyes. She doesn’t answer, but Cassandra knows. “You’ll always be with me though, won’t you?” Cassandra murmurs.

“If you will keep me in your memory, then always,” Lavellan promises.

Cassandra can feel the tears start to prick the back of her eyes, so she chooses to spend her final moment, kissing Lavellan as much as she possibly can. Over and over and over again as the stars start to break down and fall around in a shower of light that refracts around them in a perfect sphere.

 _“Ar lath ma, vhenan,”_ Lavellan whispers in Cassandra’s ear. _“Dareth shiral.”_

 

* * *

 

Cassandra wakes up in the morning with fading marks near her neck and along her waist and thighs where a mouth and fingers pressed in love as deep as possible. Cassandra watches them fade in the light of the waking dawn in the mirror. Here, in the room that was Lavellan’s that is now hers, she finds that the mantle of Inquisitor is a little easier to bear than it was a few days, weeks, months ago.

The wound that Lavellan’s absence left in her heart is still there. Cassandra can feel the divot in her heart where Lavellan made a place for herself and where she still lives on today, but she ruminates on what Lavellan told her.

To be gutted, to be left bare and open to the elements as the pain festers inside, to bleed and to break and to knit together again. All these are things that Cassandra is familiar with these things on a physical nature. Battle is not always won, luck does not always hold, and she bears her own scars on her body both with prominence and with subtlety.

But Cassandra is also familiar with pain being a reminder and a signal that something is wrong and that something must change — either she or the source — before it will go away. Perhaps it is this. Perhaps it is the fact that she must live on with Lavellan in her heart rather than Lavellan by her side

She stands up and washes her face, rinses her mouth, and feels the last part of Lavellan leave her skin. Cassandra laces on her armor and steps out to watch the still-grey turn to gold underneath the sun’s touch. A knock on her door startles her, and when she goes to open it, Leliana is there. “Leliana—” Cassandra starts to say.

Leliana interrupts her to say, “Mahanon’s back. He’s in the courtyard waiting for you.”

“For me?” Cassandra repeats.

Leliana nods, and despite the shadow over her face from her cowl, Cassandra can see the unshed tears glittering in her eyes. “About Lavellan,” she says carefully. Cassandra knows why. Leliana thinks that the mere mention of Lavellan’s name will be enough to make Cassandra crumble, and once, that was true. Now, Cassandra merely presses her hand to her heart and follows Leliana without another word.

Cassandra goes down the stairs, and as she moves, she watches as the twilight starts to recede in the wake of the sun. Leliana stops once they leave the building entirely and turns to face Cassandra. “The rest is yours,” she says simply.

Cassandra nods and murmurs, “I know. Thank you, Leliana.” Leliana steps aside to make room for Cassandra, and just before she leaves, Cassandra squeezes Leliana’s hand. She follows the path to the courtyard, and so many people have already worn down the path to packed dirt with countless footsteps.

Then, she sees him. Mahanon stands there in the center of the courtyard with the light of the rising sun framing him perfectly in a halo of light, and Cassandra’s breath catches in her throat. Even though the marks on his face aren’t the right ones, the color of his hair and the tilt of his expression is so decidedly Lavellan that it hurts.

Just because wounds heal does not mean that they still somewhat sting.

But more importantly, Cassandra’s eyes are drawn to the way his left hand crackles and burns like napalm and copper caught in an incendiary blast. Mahanon notes the way her eyes linger on his hand and lifts it up half-heartedly. “My sister always manages to find her way back home,” he tells her in a voice that has long been absent around the halls of Skyhold. “I have come to deliver her home.”

“Have you found her?” Cassandra manages to say.

Mahanon grimaces and lowers his hand back to his side. His fingers curl inward to trap the light between the cage of his hand, and he quietly says, “Not really. Not in the way you want her to be found.” He lifts his head up to gaze at the brightening expanse of the morning sky, and Cassandra follows his gaze.

The sky is faultlessly, brilliantly blue, and the sun leaves streaks of pink and pale lavender on its journey up to its zenith in the heavens. The few remnants of twilight still remain on the edges of the horizon, and there’s still some grey ringing around the tall tower of the library and the rookery. But other than that, there is nothing but a true dawn over the stones of Skyhold.

“She is already with all of us,” Mahanon says, whisper-thin and Fade-touched. “It is only up to us as to how we want to keep her. Cole is carrying the last of her words to everyone else. Words that should have been delivered long ago. I apologize for that, for occupying him enough with my own burden.” A stray spark of amusement briefly appears on his face as he says, “I suppose Cole and I are like the slow arrow: late in its arrival but steady as an arrow’s path. No matter; we are both here now with my sister. I carry her with me. What about you, Inquisitor?”

Cassandra purses her lips together at the sound of the title, and she looks back at Mahanon. He may become Inquisitor Lavellan next, but for now, she carries the title that Lavellan once bore. A wistful smile curls her lips and lifts them up to reveal her teeth to the dawn-streaked air. “I will carry her where the light enters,” she says.

A flash of recognition flickers in the darker depths of Mahanon’s eyes, and he inclines his head towards her. “And has the wound healed?” he asks.

“Not entirely,” Cassandra chooses to say. “But she is a wound I do not want to forget.”

Mahanon smiles at that: a tender thing that slowly unfurls across his face. Such a Lavellan smile, Cassandra thinks, but she will easily admit that she would easily and gladly find Lavellan in the smallest and happiest of things. Mahanon stretches his Marked hand up to the sky. The copper green of the Anchor reacts to the sunlight, making it lighter in hue. “Healed wounds are not ones you forget,” he tells her. The green light floods them both with a gentle light, and Mahanon looks at Cassandra as he says, “Healed wounds are ones you learn to live with and the ones you learn to bear. I will ask you again, Seeker who is Inquisitor, has the wound healed?”

Cassandra folds her hands together and thinks of a silent prayer. Not one for the Maker, but one for Lavellan lost in the distant country that is simultaneously near and far from her. With conviction and the pattern of love beating in her heart, Cassandra tells Mahanon:

“Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> writing this almost felt like a fever dream, and i wrote this on a single flight. it was honestly surprising to see how much and how quickly i wrote. it was meant to be a single snippet for my au drabble fic, [ephemerality](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17495342/chapters/41207669), but it quickly grew beyond that. this was heavily inspired by the two quotes about wounds in the note at the very beginning.
> 
> in regards to the fic:  
> i quite enjoyed toying with the progression of time whether it be through the times of the day or the seasons themselves. i chose to use "lavellan" to refer to ellana because i wanted to emphasize the fact that mahanon coming back was like lavellan coming back (bc they're both lavellans) and essentially lavellan finding her (and his) way back home. i also chose to use chrysanthemums since they're funeral flowers.
> 
> there’s a lot more that i was thinking about and more i’d like to discuss, but considering the word count of both the fic and this final note, i think i’ll leave it like this. thank you for reading!


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